A Boy and his God

Once upon a time Howie had a god. It lived in the kennel
where Juniper the mongrel had stayed until he died the
winter before. Howie's mom Sophie was of the opinion that
a pet god represented better value for money. After all,
it didn't wake you up barking whenever the postwoman came
by. And you didn't have to have a licence for one,
either.

Howie was inconsolable when Juniper died. They'd grown up
together, been playmates for all of Howie's twelve years,
and though Howie never did learn to wag his tail -- or
Juniper to to do his sums -- they understood one another
perfectly. He sobbed and wailed and wept rivers when
Juniper was run over, and sulked all March until Fred
Phillips said to his wife, "Don't you think it's about
time we got something to replace Juniper?"

Sophie Phillips rolled her eyes. "Pooper-scooper, she
muttered; flea powder, bath time, walks in the rain. Are
you crazy?"

Do not be decieved; it wasn't that Sophie didn't like
animals. She loved them; she'd been so crazy about
Juniper that having to take him to the vet had broken her
heart. It wasn't the worming and the whining that worried
her, but the thought of going through the trauma of the
accident again. Her husband realised this, and being who
he was he waited impatiently until she pushed her reading
glasses up the bridge of her nose with one finger, and --
knowing that at such a moment she would be distracted
enough to pay full attention -- he asked the fateful
question; "Yes, but why don't we get him something else?
A god, for instance?"

Sophie looked at him questioningly, and in that moment of
locked gazes they thought with one mind: and their
thought was this. Hounds die on you, hounds need
toilet training, hounds mean hassle; but household gods
are trouble-free. What could go wrong with a minor
deity?

She nodded significantly. "I think it's time we went for
a little drive," she said, looking at Howie. Howie's eyes
were downcast as he dug his spoon into his shreddies with
a desultory action perfected long ages ago in the salt
mines; Fred cleared his throat loudly, and Howie looked
up.

"Your mother was speaking to you, said Fred. What do you
say?"

"Aw ... what?" Howie spooned another mouthful of cereal,
playing for time. Sophie smiled tenderly at him. Fred was
of the opinion that she spoiled Howie silly but he kept
his mouth shut. Sophie had a degree in child psychology
and Fred was in awe of it.

"Your mother said something," he repeated.

Howie shifted his gaze from the direction of the demonic
abyss -- which lay somewhere below the floor of his
cereal bowl and somewhere above the planes of Hades,
according to the Dungeons and Dragons book he'd got for
Christmas -- and refocussed on Mom's face. "Yo?" he
asked, with all the charm and tact of a pre-teen
bulldozer.

My, but they grow up fast these days, Mom thought
admiringly, looking forward to adolescent sulks and no
need to have to work at bringing him up any more. "We're
going for a little drive, she said brightly; your father
and I agreed that it would be a good idea. It's about
time, after all. Since Juniper ..."

"What?" Howie looked at her, spoon poised in mid air. A
thin trickle of dirty milk dribbled back into his bowl as
his hand sagged under the weight of his curiosity.

"It's time we took you to temple," said Mom. "We're going
to buy you a God."

You sell pets through a pet shop, but for Gods you have
to go to Temple. Temple was downtown, a sprawling great
drive-in cathedral city that stank of incense and
resounded with the noise of striking gongs, booming
drums, chanting acolytes -- recorded, of course -- and
human sacrifice.

The complex sprawled because you have to keep gods well
apart. Being fiercely territorial, gods tend to fight
violently and utter the most fearsome curses on sight of
a potential rival; and besides, real estate was cheap
downtown. They'd built minarets up either side of the
entrance boulevard -- very phallic, Sophie thought -- and
as she pulled the Toyota up at the gatehouse she shook
her head and tut-tutted quietly to herself.
Terrible, she thought, exposing little boys to
such oedipal archetypes! What can the architect have been
thinking of?

"Hiya," she called, head half out of the window; "Sophie
Phillips and family. I phoned ahead, remember?"

"Pleased to meet you ma'am!" said the bronzed, grinning
gatekeeper. "If you'd like to wait just a second we'll
have one of our salesmen join you for your journey round
our complex." He glanced over his shoulder. "Moon," he
hissed. The smile slipped back into place with just a
seconds' hesitation. "Minister Moon will be joining you
presently, ma'am."

A door beside the window opened and a butterball oriental
stepped out, face all glowing teeth and sunglasses above
his hawaiian shirt. He walked round the car and Sophie
unlocked one of the passenger doors. "Glad to meet you
ma'am, name's Sunny Moon, but you can call me Sunny if
you want! Hope you enjoy your visit here, have a nice day
as well," he added, glancing nervously at her. Something
about women in mirrorshades gave him a funny turn. He sat
down gingerly on the other side of the back seat to
Howie, who cast him a long, cool stare. Sophie nodded at
the gatekeeper and slid the Buick into gear; then she
moved off along the driveway.

"Here on your right we see the temple of the old Egyptian
pantheon," Moon began, launching into his spiel. It was a
huge, sand-weathered pyramid fronted by a temple. "All
the way from Thoth the ibis-headed, especially good with
academics and those interested in learning, to Osiris,
god of the dead and judge of souls. Actually he's a bit
patchy -- ever since his rival Set chopped him into lots
of little pieces and lost them all over the Upper Nile.
Tell the truth," Moon added confidentially, "I wouldn't
recommend any of this mob to you; they're a bit clannish
and you'll end up with heiroglyphics all over the
bathroom walls and stacks of mummified cats in the
cellar." He shut up as Mom nodded and drove on; like many
a salesman before him, Moon had mastered the art of
sizing up his client and was seducing her with his
apparent objectivity before the Big Sell.

"Over there we see Valhalla, hall of dead heroes and home
of the Norse deities. This lot are especially good with
Scandinavian buyers, but they do tend to drink a lot and
party at odd hours. Midnight sun, you know. We had a few
Hells Angels the other week who seemed to think Loki
would make a good mascot for their chapter, but they got
kind of annoyed when he cheated at pool. Anyway."

Sophie Phillips drove on, even when the road curled
around an outrageous nipple-shaped protrusion covered in
the most intricate mosaics. "Here we have one of the more
abstract deities, a kind of second cousin to that Jewish
Big God Person. You can't actually see him but if you
adopt him you get to lead a horde of millions of
fanatical followers. He's big on marriage -- you can have
up to four wives -- " he looked at Sophie and backtracked
hastily " -- but you get your right hand chopped off for
drinking and you have to pray to him five times a day."
Mom glanced at him in the mirror and nodded, very
slightly, as they drove on; Moon sweated. Howie slumped
in the back seat, bored.

"Actually, most of the deities in this quadrant are a bit
abstract for a kid," Moon chattered. "I'd think a young
man like your son" -- he actually looked at Howie for the
first time since getting into the car -- "would be more
interested in something he could sort of relate to on a
personal level. Now over here -- yeah, you want to take
this left fork and carry on there, yes, into the tunnel
-- we have a special deal this week. This is where we
keep the Elder Gods. It's not so much that they're old
stock as that most people want, well, something more
familiar."

Sophie Phillips, to whom the words more familiar
translated as more expensive, sat up straighter.
The road disappeared into a hole in the ground, dropping
smoothly until the raw stone arched overhead and covered
them. There were no lamps; she switched the headlights on
as she drove. The walls seemed to glisten with an
invisible sheen of sweat, as if the weight above them was
squeezing blood from the stones. This tunnel didn't look
like a recent excavation; more like an ancient, dank,
brooding gateway into some isolated network of caverns
that had threaded the rocks under New England since long
before European settlers first trod these shores. She
removed her glasses, looked about, and sniffed. Birth
tunnel experience, she thought. How Freudian can
you get?

Moon, who had been silent for a few blissful moments,
picked up his sales-pitch again. "Folks, you are now
about to see the Elder Gods. This bunch are rather less
sociably acceptable than some, they tend to slobber a bit
and you've got to take care not to let them on the
carpet. That said, an Elder God can make a faithful pet,
an obedient servant, and a lifetime companion. Keep 'em
somewhere shady in the back yard and water it when it
doesn't rain. You won't get any trouble from rats or mice
while you've got an Old One on the premises, and -- "

He shut up as Sophie hit the brakes. The tunnel debouched
into a monstrous cavern, the centre of which was occupied
by a circular black pool. Dark tunnel-mouths led off in
all directions. The halogen glare of the headlights cast
great shadows which imparted an air of instant, brooding
menace to the turbid waters that lapped at the nearside
tyres. Something about the pool spoke of ancient evil, of
things left undisturbed since before the dawn of time, of
an aura of necrotic decay that accounted for the
stillness of the air in some bizarre, twisted manner.

"Kill the lights", said Moon. Sophie complied. The
darkness was not complete; overhead a myriad of
toadstools cast their ghastly luminescence across the
surface of the pond, reflecting like distant, unnameably
ancient stars in a cosmos no human eye was meant to see.
Moon wound down the window. "Cthulhu!" he roared. "Here
Boy! Fish!"

Reaching into a pocket he pulled out something that
glistened faintly in the ghost-light. He cast it far out
into the pool, where it sank with a sickly plop that
spread no ripples on the surface. "Squid", he whispered
by way of explanation; "always brings him."

"No problem!" she answered determinedly. "They're
chicken, are gods. Can't stand up to a determined
atheist, not a-one of them. You'll see!" Howie sat up
attentively and looked out the window. A smile began to
tug at his lips; a smile of anticipation.

A ripple appeared on the surface of the lake, a ripple
which rapidly grew wider and higher as if some
unspeakable bulk was rising up from a slumber of aeons,
deep on the floor of some miles-deep rift in the
continental bedrock. There was an ominous breeze blowing,
as if the very air was being displaced from the cavern;
then something, shapeless and huge, monstrous beyond
belief and twice as ugly, began to rear itself from the
centre of the lake. Howie gaped at it in frank adoration.

Sophie took one look in her mirror and changed her mind.
"Big sucker, isn't he?" she said; "bet there isn't room
for him in our fishpond!" She slipped the Buick into gear
with a jolt, and they disappeared off up the next side
tunnel with Howie still struggling to control his
disappointment.

Behind them, Cthulhu continued his monumental rise from
his far-drowned bed. His spine was so tall that it took
whole minutes for a command to travel the length of all
those synapses; he often took so long to stop sitting up
that he bumped his head on the ceiling. He saw twin red
lights vanishing up a tunnel that his memory said led to
the abode of his cousin Shub-Niggurath. Ponderously he
swung his oversized, misshapen abomination of a head to
look after them; tentacles drooped and squirmed from his
pulp y lower lip as he examined Moon's squid, clutched in
one unspeakable appendage. He shook his head. So
long, he rumbled; cheapskates!

Eventually Sophie and Fred bargained their prodigal down
to one -- just one -- child of the unspeakable
Shub-Niggurath, father of the woods and eternal spawner
of obscene life forms in his root-roofed cavern beneath
the rolling green hillsides around Arkham City. It took
dire threats and the promise of fish for supper every
night for a week to forestall the promised tantrum and
flood of tears that greeted Sophie's outright refusal to
countenance a Cthulhu. Fred even threatened to buy Howie
a beaming fat Buddha if he didn't behave himself; this
latter threat seemed to do the trick. "That's cute," he
spat as if the very suggestion brought images of saintly
abstinence to mind.

"Here's your very own user-manual," said Moon, beaming as
he handed Howie a leatherbound copy of the Necronomicon;
"remember, Old Ones don't like sunlight, they need a
plentiful supply of water and a bit of fresh blood from
time to time, and don't let it get at the neighbours'
daughter. You know, the girl next door? Good boy! Have a
nice day!"

He continued beaming even as the sweating porters levered
the tarpaulin-draped crate into the back of the car and
Sophie signed the Amex voucher. His smile only slipped
when he saw the happy family drive away. He shook his
head dolefully. "There goes another one, Ron, he said.
Misers don't wanna know about the big stuff ..."

"Well hell, ya got to hand it to them," said Ron,
propping his feet up on the desk and putting down his pen
-- Ron fancied himself as a writer of science fiction --
"at least they took it off of our hands! Now you --" he
jabbed his fingers at Moon -- "when're you gonna take
advantage of our staff discount scheme?" He winked, an
affected nautical mannerism that irritated the hell out
of Moon.

The Phillips family arrived home and the installation of
Shub-junior -- or Junior as he rapidly became known --
proceeded smoothly. Juniper's kennel was the obvious
home, given Junior's glutinous propensities, and Fred
insisted that Mom lay down the law before Howie could go
play with his new pet.

"Remember," said Mom, finger poised before her face;
"Junior's not to get on the carpet! Your Dad will have a
fit if he sees goop all over the staircase, and he's not
allowed in the kitchen either. You'll have to walk him at
night; and remember you mustn't pray to him. That's
almost as bad as sacrificing."

"Why can't I pray to him if I want to?" demanded Howie,
staring up at Sophie and trying to figure what Junior
would make of his new red skateboard.

"You musn't ever worship a God," she said; "it's very
important. If you worship them they get more and more
powerful until they start telling you to do unreasonable
things. Once everybody worshipped their gods, and things
were really bad. Only now we know better." She grinned
with satisfaction, speculating about her son's need for a
pre-adolescent bonding ritual.

Howie picked his nose, deeply puzzled. Surely you needed
two legs to balance on a skateboard ..? "Yes, but if I
can't worship my very own god, what can I pray to?" he
asked.

"Conspicuous consumption," said Fred, backing into the
kitchen with a heap of frozen microwave apple pies on a
tray. "Gods all promise jam tomorrow; at least this way
you get to have your cake and eat it!"

He laughed as he tied on his apron. "You just go play
with your deity," he said. "Lunch in twenty, right?"

After their first ecstatic bonding, Howie and Junior were
was as inseperable as any boy and god could be. On many
summer evenings you could look outside after dusk and see
the two of them bounding along the sidewalk, Howie
weaving his skateboard from side to side and Junior
racing to and fro across front lawns, gibbering and
leaving a thin trail of slime in his efforts to keep up.
Sometimes they swapped, and Howie would jog along huffing
and puffing while Junior rumbled after him on the 'board.
As they passed the neat white picket fences lining the
road, hounds would bark frantically and cats would spit
from the cover of bushes; but Howie didn't care. At
school he would look at his fellow fifth-graders with a
gleam in his eye; I bet your pet can't ride a skate
board, he would sneer to himself. And it was true.
This was a small town, and skateboarding elder gods were
as thin on the ground as hang-gliding rabbis.

The summer recess stretched into a halcyon period of
long, hot evenings and quiet, starlit nights. Sometimes
during the early hours, Howie would be awakened by the
noise of scraping from the back yard. Junior was quite
smart for a deity, and had mastered the art of letting
himself out whenever he felt like going for a midnight
ramble. He was always back by dawn though, and nobody
mentioned the matter unless Junior was careless and left
a manhole cover open by mistake.

But the year rolled on towards autumn, and that September
Howie was due to start sixth grade. He didn't want to go
back to school -- Aw, mom, -- what kid does? But
he had to.

"Look Howie, it's nothing big," Mom told him on the first
morning of term. "Everybody has to go through it. Look at
me -- I was at school once, you know? And look what it
made of me!" Howie looked up at her through the wrong end
of a conceptual telescope. He was still of an age when
cause and effect were confusing.

"But I don't want to know all about Nietzche or Sartre,"
he complained; "they got funny names and Miz Jones laughs
at me when I, when I --" he subsided into gasps of
outrage at the very thought that he might mispronounce
their names to entertaining effect.

"There, there!" soothed Mom. "You'll see, it's not that
bad! If you don't learn about existential philosophy and
logical positivism in school, how can you expect to earn
a living in this world? What'll you do when you grow up?"
She picked him up and hugged him, grunting slightly with
the effort -- Howie was turning into a big boy, just like
his father -- and looked him in the eye. "And don't you
worry about Miss Jones. I'm sure she doesn't mean
anything, but if she does ... well, your mom used to be a
mud-wrestler, right?" She swung him in a loop until he
laughed like crazy and struggled, then set him down
again. "Now eat your shreddies, dear! Have you fed Junior
today?"

"Naw," he said sullenly. "Dad said he would."

Anyway, it fell to Sophie to drive Howie to school and
drop him off there with all the other kids. Howie had by
this time convinced himself that he was going to have an
awful day, so indeed he did; existentialism had nothing
on his angst, which expressed itself to the full when
Candy Jessup, who had freckles and red hair and a brace
and sat behind him, tugged his pigtail when Miss Jones
wasn't looking. It was a lesson about Descartes, so it
probably didn't happen anyway. Howie turned round and
snarled at her, quietly and with awesome ferocity: "I've
got a skateboarding god who bites and I'm going to set
him on you after school, so there!"

"Ooh." Candy screwed her face up around an 'O' of a mouth
and looked ever so faintly amused. "Kiddie's got a pet
god, has he? Wanna put your god up against my pit bull
terrier?" She grinned mockingly and Howie noticed some
things about her; mascara and lipstick and a black
leather jacket. Candy was growing up, already apeing her
elders, and she hung out with a bunch of older girls.

He was about to come out with a crushing rejoinder when
an iron pair of fingers clamped themselves to the back of
his neck and forcibly rotated his head. "And what have we
got here?" asked Miss Jones, in her Number Two (scathing)
tone of voice. "A silly -- shake -- little -- rattle --
boy, not paying attention in class!"

Ouch. Yes, very silly. Howie looked up and Miss Jones
looked down with all the concilliatory charm of a
rattlesnake. "And what have you got to say for yourself?"
she asked, the personification of steely retribution. The
room fell silent around her, for all the world loves an
execution. "Talking in class, idle chatter, and not
paying attention. Do you know what happens if you stop
paying attention?" she boomed.

Howie winced in anticipation. "You stop existing?" he
asked hesitantly. Thwack! came the sound of a
smart clip round the ear.

"Guess again", Miss Jones said drily as she returned to
the front of the class and retrieved her chalk. "Now as I
was saying ..."

The day dragged on into dystopian distemper for Howie,
and when the bell finally rang he ran out into the
afternoon sunlight as fast as he could. That was a
mistake. Candy's gang was hanging out just past the gate,
and they were all there waiting for him; Bernice and
Lilly the Pink and Tarantula deVille who was heavily into
black lace and studs; and the big, sullen one they all
called Helen J. Uh oh, he thought, but he wasn't
tempted to repeat his solipsistic experiment out here,
not after his disastrous failure to dispell Miss Jones
that morning. He steeled himself as he walked towards
them.

"Hiya kiddy," shouted Candy. "Think I don't exist, huh?"

Oh shit, he thought. I think, therefore I'm
not here ...

"Yeah, kid," drawled Bernice, crop haired number two to
Candy's El Presidente pose, she who was by right lawful
custodian of the gang ghetto blaster which even now
perched upon a wall, overloading with transients from
something ominously hardcore; "you wanna mess with us?"
She pushed herself away from the wall with a swing of her
ample hips and shambled towards him like a great
irritated bear. Tarantula deVille leered at him and went
back to preening long black fingernails that glinted
ominously in the sunlight.

"You and whose army?" Howie swore, looking round
desperately. There at the other end of the street was
mom's Buick, rounding the corner with light gleaming from
the chrome. "Hey, gotta go," he sang out; "'less you want
my mom to jump on you!" He turned and sped across the
road. If wishes were fishes, he ruminated, his dinner'd
be awfully boring.

It was dad behind the steering wheel. "Your mom's going
to be home late," he said brightly as they pulled away
from the turbulent stormclouds of adolescent experience.
"She's staying over at the office; there's some kind of
problem come up."

"Uh-huh," said Howie, musing on his close escape. Dad
drove on, chopping lanes and booting the gas pedal as if
a politician was after his vote.

"Howie," he said presently, "was that a bunch of girls I
saw you playing with just then?"

"Uh-huh," he replied.

Dad cleared his throat; "How many times have I told you
..." he changed track ... "what will all the other boys
in class say? Do you want them to think you're interested
in girls?"

Howie, who did want them to think that (because
it was a kind of grown-up thing to do), and who wasn't
about to tell Dad of all people just what he'd been doing
with those girls -- or about to have had done to him --
kept his mouth zipped. "Aw, Dad," he whined.

"Don't you aw Dad me, young man," said Fred, who was
bitterly afraid that Howie was going to disappoint him.
His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel at the
thought of Howie growing his hair long and having his
ears pierced and enslaving himself voluntarily before the
juggernaut of bizarre fashions, all in the interests of
catching a member of the opposite sex. "It's not healthy,
Howie. If you go on like this your mom is going to have
to take you to see the doctor, you know that? You naughty
boy! And at your age too!" He resolved to talk to Mom
about this, later, in private. Howie rolled his eyes but
kept quiet. When they got home Dad made it obvious that
he was in the doghouse, so he went into the backyard to
relate to Junior. He curled up in the corner of the
kennel and Junior leaned up against him and gibbered
affectionately to the beat of his cassette player. Howie
ran fingers through his slimy palps and toyed with one of
his longer tentacles until Junior rolled over and
presented his dryish tongue to be scratched, but nothing
Junior did could shift his master's depression.
Eventually the tape came to the end, so Howie flipped
sides and pressed playback before Junior could sit up and
beg; he seemed to have a thing about the Dead Kennedys,
which was okay by Howie.

"It's awful," he sighed. "Miss Jones won't go away if I
ignore her, whatever she says, and Candy pulled my
pigtail and was horrible to me and her gang're going to
beat me up and what'm'I'goin'to DO, Junior?
Answer me that, mm? Gonna get stomped by girls and Dad
thinks I'm hanging around and I'm unhappy. Watcha gonna
do?"

Burble, said Junior.

Now Howie had listened when mom told him why not to pray
to Junior, but it seemed to him that if he ever needed a
friend it was now. Mom didn't take him to the doctor, but
bottles of little white pills appeared in the bathroom
cabinet and she kept after him with injunctions to keep
taking his vitamins so he'd grow up to be a big boy.
Howie did -- all the way to Junior, who developed quite a
taste for stanozolol and androsterone. Howie stopped
hanging about late and taking his time leaving school, so
even though Candy carried on pulling his pigtail and
whispering obscene, lascivious suggestions in his ear
when Miss Jones wasn't looking he didn't get beat up. Not
yet, anyway.

When they'd bought him, Junior had been about the size of
a large terrier. He was growing large on a diet of red
meat, anabolic steroids and prayer. He slept with his
tentacles in the open air, twitching faintly as he
dreamed of whatever it is Elder Ones dream of; on more
and more nights he sneaked stealthily out of his kennel
and down the manholes, until the public health inspectors
came to look at the sewers and scratched their heads in
wonder and pronounced the town rat-free for the first
time in living memory. Mom had to get out her saw and
enlarge the kennel opening.

"He just growed," Howie confided to his friends at school
-- 'Fingers' Freddy and The Worm, who oohed and aahed
appreciatively. Neither of them had a god, although The
Worm had a pet snake which spent most of its time asleep
and didn't notice if you prayed to it. It didn't grow
either, nor did it gibber at the full moon and rattle its
tentacles on the picket fences when it went skateboarding
with Howie. Howie had an old walkman from when he was a
kid, and he rigged it so that the headphones fit a couple
of Junior's orofices -- whether they were ears or not he
wasn't certain, but they sure looked funny and Junior
seemed to like it -- so that he could listen to the Dead
Kennedys as he rolled down the sidewalk on his red
skateboard. Yes, even if Howie was unhappy and uncertain
at school his pet god was doing just fine; he even had a
worshipper, and what more can any self-respecting deity
ask than that?

(Lots, actually.)

As autumn wore on, the nights grew longer. Candy
tormented him intermittently, asked him to go out with
her then had a good laugh at him with her gang when he
refused out of knock-kneed terror. Going out with her,
while not a totally repulsive prospect, would expose him
to the Gang ... and girls in gangs are utterly different
to girls on their own. So she continued to pull his
pigtail in class -- almost coyly, as if to retain his
interest -- and hang out downtown at night.

Late one afternoon, Miss Stead -- who was, if anything,
more fearsome than Miss Jones -- lectured them about the
evils of logical positivism. She closed her big textbook
with a thud and a spurt of dust, just as the bell rang.
"Now go and be good children and read chapter seven
before your next lesson, all of you!" she said. "And
remember that the test next Tuesday will cover Bertrand
Russell and the post-Godelian numerotheologists!" Candy
yawned elaborately behind Howie: who didn't look round,
so he didn't see that her brace had emigrated to leave a
spotless bite and sultry lips that could have graced a
film star. He packed his books and stood up, then Candy
grabbed him from behind.

"Aw, fuck." She pronounced it with the breathless
reverence of one who had just discovered what the word
meant and wondered if it was fun. "You're no good, Kiddy.
Hey, I betcha you don't so have a god, anyway!" She let
go of his throat and stepped back.

"If you want." Sullen now, Howie was beginning to see how
this short-haired freckle-faced imp had outmanoeuvred
him.

"Okay," she said. "See you tonight, right? Out by Fat
Mac's."

"Hey, ah," he said, but she'd already gone, doubtless to
tell her gang to be there or be square to see her seduce
him or something ghastly. What was he going to do? His
mind boggled.

That evening saw Howie in a real tizzy. He fiddled and
put in his best earrings and pulled on his best levis and
running shoes. Then he got out the skateboard and Junior
obligingly hopped on and waited while Howie put on his
headphones. "You're going to behave now, you hear me?"
Howie prayed. "And everything's going to be right, right,
'cos you're going to make it right, right? A-men!" He
pressed the play button and Junior belched to the beat of
Holiday in Cambodia, rocked to Kalifornia Uber Alles, and
waved his tentacles as Howie towed him out onto the
sidewalk. In the dim light he seemed to glow with the
repressed energy of prayers and steroids, vibrating and
shimmering at the edges as if his skateboard was surfing
through extraplanar realities in a cosmos too vast and
terrible for human senses to comprehend.

(Actually, Junior was surfing through an
n-dimensional spatial construct. Howie was
lamentably blind to the cosmic influences of the higher
planes; to the snowflakes of light that whirled in an
everlasting blizzard through the vast spaces of infinite
insanity: and to the window into emptiness which the
power of his prayer had opened. Harmless in and of
himself though Junior was, nevertheless something
horrifying had been activated within his diminutive frame
by the pernicious virus of belief. Steroid-fed and
anarchic, a spirit of pure evil was growing, pulsing in
time to the punk rock overspill which Howie had
unknowingly attached to some of Junior's genitals in
mistake for ears. As he was to discover ...)

Candy and her gang were hanging out at the crossroads
MacRonalds, stuffing their faces, when along the
boulevard came the oddest sight any of them had ever
seen. It wasn't so much the cute boy with the earings and
blond hair and designer jeans that turned their heads --
although he got a wolf-whistle from Bernice -- but his
companion who stunned them. A large, quivering lump of
tentacles, claws, palps, lubricious orofices and
quivering eye stalks was rare enough on these mean
streets. To see this self-same lump riding a red perspex
skateboard and listening to the Dead Kennedys on a
walkman added a unique touch. Jaws dropped; fragments of
masticated cow landed in the dirt, unnoticed.

"Shit", breathed Candy, with the reverence of the truly
surprised. "Do you see where the headphones --" she
stopped. Unlike Howie she didn't need labels for labia.

"Do you believe it?" drawled Tarantula deVille to her
sister Mortitia, who'd come along for the ride. "The
boy's balling a ball!" Mortitia sniggered knowingly, even
though she was too young and naive to understand.

"Betcha he isn't," said Candy, captivated. The light of
the setting sun sparkled fire through Howie's hair, and
she just knew that he was an innocent young thing waiting
for the hot taste of her lips to awaken passionate
desires supressed for too long by, by ... she shook her
head, at a loss for adjectives. "Here, take this," she
said, passing her hamburger remnants to Helen J., who
looked at them in deep disgust (being a vegan). She
swaggered out into the road, hips swinging and cowboy
boots clacking on the blacktop, to meet her paramour and
rival.

"Hiya kiddy," she said, chewing non-existent gum and
looking him in the eye. "Glad ya could make it. Who's
this here friend o' yours?"

Howie, for his part, stared at her, noticing for the
first time that the brace was gone from her teeth, that
her hair was short and extremely sexy, that he was male
and she wasn't, and that despite all his mothers'
conditioning (ideologically sound in view of the
population explosion) he was still of heterosexual bent,
and that his jeans were embarassingly tight. "Uh," he
said.

Candy bent over Junior, who bounced up and down on the
board menacingly and clacked his -- or rather, her --
claws together. "Come on," she said, don't be coy! "Who
are you?"

Gobble, said Junior; grubble gurgle grunt
snoo-oo-ork! She bounced the front wheels of the
board from side to side, nearly falling off it in her
agitation.

"Hey," said Howie, "I think you've got Junior excited.
Now you've seen him, what do you want?"

"Well," said Candy, swinging her hips suggestively, "you
can come with me, hang out with the gang for a while,
right? Maybe --" her eyes flickered from side to side --
"we could kiss. You want to be my boyfriend?"

"Ung," said Howie, who had half-expected an invitation to
be her punchbag. Junior jumped up and down and the
skateboard squeaked. He seemed to be getting awfully
indignant about something, Howie realized through the
haze of his disconcertion.

"Come on," coaxed Candy, taking his hand. "Come this
way?"

Now the trouble was about to begin. It was about to begin
because of a single technical problem; Howie's walkman
didn't have auto-reverse. The tape had come to the end of
the side, and Junior could hear everything. (The fact
that Howie'd screwed the headphones into her genitals
notwithstanding; sensitive skin, y'know, picks up
vibrations.) Now it takes a lot to get an Elder God
jealous, especially a very young, very inexperienced
Elder God, but there's one lesson that all Gods are born
knowing, and that's that once your worshippers get all
starry-eyed and start making love all over the place you
lose all hold over their guilt; and without guilt, where
is the motive for prayer? For obedience? Junior thought
she was about to be jilted, with good reason. And unlike
a powerful Big God Person of days gone by, Junior had no
priesthood to pronounce anathema upon the couple; so
she/he/it decided to take matters into his/her/it's own
claws/palps/tentacles.

Howie, entranced, turned his back upon Junior and
revelled in the warm, tight grip of his very first
girl-friend as she led him towards the lights and the
company of her gang. As they reached the kerb, she
stopped suddenly and turned, so that he found himself
walking into her open arms. Surprise. They closed around
him -- so unlike the choke-grip of classroom days -- and
he found his lips touching something soft and yielding
and moist and utterly different that seemed to promise
the future to him. He didn't fight or struggle; it was
too much fun.

Mortitia, who was too young for this, looked away
disgustedly while her big sister grinned carnivorously
and stretched her black claws out to the couple. Helen J.
turned her back grumpily. So it happened that only
Bernice noticed the skateboarding punk-rocker of an Elder
God on anabolic steroids who was accelerating ominously
towards them from way back down the boulevard, sparks
grating from the skateboard wheels, squatting in a kind
of schuss position and gnashing her ominously long,
needle-sharp teeth. Junior glowed, glowed with the rage
of a deity scorned, shone with the light of
steroid-induced psychosis, the violent flare of martyrdom
and a hundred bloody jihads as she rumbled down the
street in a foaming of orofices and a clattering of
lobster claws. And as Junior glowed she grew, bulking
higher and broader and more hideous by the moment until
she filled the road with a rushing wall of darkness that
blotted out the sky and the stars and the promise of
rescue.

SPLAT!

"That was Junior," said Howie, staring in disbelief at
the enormous mass draped over the hood of the Mack truck
that had been crossing the intersection at exactly the
wrong time; "my god!"

"Yeah," said Howie, mouth still adroop and heart pummeling
his ribs into submission. "What d'you suppose got into
him?"

"A touch --" she goosed him -- "of jealousy. Come on?"

But Howie didn't move. He looked at the mess in the road
and shook his head. "Do you believe it?" he murmured to
himself; "there went my walkman and my best ole Dead
Kennedys tape!" He shook his head again but, to his
surprise, he didn't shed a tear. Gods have always preyed
on ignorance; and Howie, as he turned his back on it, had
more important things to think about.